One of the major contributions of computers and software to people's daily lives was the automation of widely used tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet calculations, and diagramming. Not only did these applications automate and make various tasks usable by anyone, but they also added many new capabilities in manipulating a wide range of documents and data. Until recently, a typical environment included a standalone or networked computer with a particular application installed on it. Thus, the user was working with an application installed and executed on their local computer using data also stored locally. One disadvantage of this approach is that applications may have to be reinstalled every time an updated version is available, the computing device is replaced, etc., and the user needs to be working on the machine that has the software installed on it.
A recent trend in providing the same document creation and manipulation capabilities without the burden of having a full scale application installed on the user's computer is enabling users to perform the same tasks through web access. In a typical web access service, the user may utilize a hosted service to create new documents, manipulate existing ones through a networked medium such as the Internet. The documents may be stored by the hosted service or at the user's local computer. A typical web access service is for data visualization (e.g. diagramming). Some data visualization pipelines are restricted to refresh data from a limited set of known data sources. Without a provision to enable plugging in data from custom data sources, data from non-native sources may have to be fit into a supported data source when a browser request to render data is being processed by the web server.